The present invention relates to an apparatus that can be used to drive pilings and/or anchor piles and similar anchoring devices into the ground.
In the traditional mode of driving piles, large apparatus must be used to drive anchor piles into the ground. Once driven, these piles can be used for various tasks, ranging from anchor points to foundational supports, to tether points and more. Since pilings must be driven very deeply into the ground, it is a physical and logistical impossibility to transport and handle a piling which would be long enough to serve its purpose of being driven deep into the earth in a single section. To combat this, pilings are manufactured and delivered in sections, which must then be pieced together as part of the driving process into what is referred to herein as a “pile string”, or series of pile sections forming a sufficiently long piling.
In the current state of the art, these pilings may be driven by immense downward force, such as a pneumatic hammer, or by turning the pilings into the ground via torque being applied to one end of the piling, and possibly aided by helical plates on the other end to help displace earth as the pile string is being driven, similar to the manner in which a drill bit bores material as it is driven into a surface.
Obvious downsides to the current mode of pile driving exist. Having an apparatus capable of delivering the enormous amounts of pressure to the end of a piling to drive it down by pneumatic or other action is not only expensive, but takes up large amounts of space, thus driving equipment costs up. Such driving or “hammering” of pilings is also loud and dangerous, requiring special permitting and is often restricted to certain areas of installation and use. In fact, in the inventor's state, pile driving is one of the few activities left that still carry strict liability upon the operator of the pile driving equipment.
The current method of applying rotational energy to a piling is similarly disadvantageous. Sections of piling are attached together by a very haphazard method of making the pilings of a malleable material and requiring a set of dies to form the sections of pipe for the pilings to conform to each other. Of course, as with any metal material, deforming and reshaping it with tools as crude as a hammer and dies weaken the material, which in the cases of the pile sections, are generally not constructed with this type of deformation in mind, to say nothing of the time and arduousness of having to form pile sections into shape just in order to drive them.
The consequence of these issues is increased cost, more dangerous operation, and an inferior installation. Breakages also occur because of the weakening of the metal in a “die” installation.
The present invention of a collar-based coupling system is thus a much-improved apparatus for driving or installing pilings, as it requires no deformation of the material, no noisy or complex machinery, and improves most every aspect of the piling operation while also featuring reduced cost and increased reliability.
All of these aspects of the current mode of driving anchor piles lead to an increased need for a revised method of driving these piles with minimized cost and complexity, all of which the present invention addresses.